(4500 words)

© M.T. Karthik 2024

It was as if the ocean herself took a gulp. The wave was instantly far above him. The riptide churned and he tumbled in the suck.

Kiran let himself roll until struck by the terror he had not taken a deep enough breath. He unrolled parallel with the wave and opened his eyes but saw only pulses of light.

At last the pull lessened. He strained to the surface, broke through into the bright sunshine and gasped, swallowing air. He breast-stroked to the shallows, crawled up on the sand, and collapsed, exhausted.

A wrinkled old man wrapped in cotton squatted on the sand a few feet away. He remained unmoved. Kiran lay face down, beached, sputtering. The man spoke.

“Good. You did not panic.”

The old man shifted slowly. His eyes narrowed. He returned to staring out to the distant horizon.

Kiran lay in the sand, breathing hard. The waves lapped up the legs of his trunks, chilling him. His cheek was pressed into the speckled sand. His open eye focused on the tiny grains.

When he was younger, most likely stoned, he’d have concentrated on the microverse of color and texture, aimlessly. Instead, at 45, he found himself reminded of the article he’d just read about this beach. He propped himself up with both arms, peered at the sand.

“Is this monazite,” he thought, “What color is monazite?” He seemed to remember it was a reddish-brown.

It wasn’t the first time he’d misjudged the tide. The last time was years before, but the feeling was discretely precise: the grip in his chest and his mind screaming, “I’m out of breath!”

But  instantaneous to the panic was a knowledge not to. His rational mind took charge.

His heart was pounding. He shuddered and felt older. Kiran gathered himself and stood. The Indian Ocean licked his ankles. A brahminy kite, Haliastur indus, screeched. He turned to see it dive into the tide. It emerged with a fish. It hunted in the sea, on land, in the air, a masterful omnipresence. The mated pair that nested in a palm tree near his hut were apex predators. He watched the male fly off toward home with his catch.

Kiran was master of little, apex of nowhere. He had come back to his birthplace to resurrect himself, but thus far all he had resurrected were memories that burdened him. He swam twice a day and stayed fit but his spirit flagged. He was shiftless. Soon, he’d have to leave.

“But not yet,” he thought.

He stumbled to his towel, grabbed his novel and sunglasses and headed back to the hut he called home the past three months.

Kiran plodded up the beach warily, avoiding the shits of the villagers and pied-dogs. His mind twisted in the blistering heat. Summer on this coast culminated in hot winds; Agni Natchathiram, the hottest period of the year on the Tamil calendar. It was way-offseason, which was why he could afford to return to India at all. Now, he was broke.

Kiran stopped at the gate to the gravel road that led back to the village. He shook the sand off his chappals and dusted his feet. Children ran about. No one paid him attention. He had almost drowned. He wondered if the old man would have let him.

There was a narrow pathway between the beach and the village, fenced off by wind-bent bamboo. He turned the corner to the path and the tintamarre of the beach dropped dramatically. It was the mid-morning calm.

Dawn was the loudest time of day, from cock’s crow, through crow’s caw, multiple staticky jam-boxes and at least one television set every hundred feet projecting bhajans and popular songs. Through it all, Kiran lay awake in bed or sat at his desk with coffee. The clatter came to an end abruptly – when there was a brief silence into which the cow next door lowed – an enormous sound.

Kiran had seen his neighbor wash the ass of that cow with her bare hands and water with as much care as she gave her own child.

It did not go unnoticed in the village that Kiran bought fish from Ambika, and at least once a week went into town and had a steak at the French restaurant, or a burger or a chicken sandwich.

Despite being born a local Brahmin, he wasn’t a vegetarian – yet another count chalked up to his Americanism, like the western accent he had when speaking Tamil.

He’d traveled on a U.S. passport, a citizen for decades, but here in his birthplace, unemployed and divorced, he was untethered. That was why he had returned: to see if he still belonged, or to discover for certain he no longer belonged, here.

Within days he knew it was moronic to think he could answer such a question, in three months, ten years or a lifetime.

The trouble was, with the changes in the U.S., he no longer felt he belonged there either.

A respite from the war on terror seemed to emerge with the election of a well-educated and earnest black Democrat – who had voted against the Iraq War.

He and the First Black First Lady breathed fresh air into the nation for nine months, when <wham> slammed the financial crisis of 2008, plunging the country into deep recess.

Bad economic times dispensed by a personable and intelligent President numbed everybody Kiran knew further. They began to ignore the drone strikes and Iraq and Guantanamo and the incessant war.

Suddenly the pressure to buy-in was real. They succumbed to the insistent crush of the seductive digital economy – joined Facebook and Twitter and put increasingly complicated phones in their pockets and then in their homes, devices that spied on them freely.

As Kiran’s friend Siva, a professor of culture and media studies put it, in his book on Facebook: “It isn’t Orwell, it’s Huxley.”

When he decided to return to India, Kiran felt on the cusp of something. He was desperate for direction but earnest no one else should author it.

He wanted to know what he was supposed to have learned by now. What was life supposed to have taught him?

He walked through the village quickly and swept through his gate. He rinsed off his feet with the hose on the cement patio and wondered if the reddish water swirling down the drain was monazite.

Months before, a stone carver he’d invited over had pointed out the mineral’s value, but Kiran had done nothing to investigate. He didn’t act on the possibilities right beneath his own feet until it was too late.

“Shit or get off the pot,” Phillipe had said, but with his accent, it was hilarious.

Kiran cursed his sloth as he showered. The hut and its small yard were surrounded by an eight foot wall which allowed Kiran to live unobserved by the villagers. This contributed to their speculatory gossip about him.

He took advantage of the privacy to walk around naked after a shower. He liked drying off openly in the hot Tamil air. It was something he would never do anywhere else. It felt so natural and normal here. Everything felt more base here.

He felt more like the animal he was. Yet he was no longer that animal. Knowing it was like a sting. Had he loved at all?

The sting and that question were immediately followed by a flood of images – Jim Carrey smiling like a tool in The Truman Show. He wondered if his entire American life was a simulacrum.

If he felt more connected to the animal he really was here, then what had he been there?

Who had played hoops and spun records?

Who had loved Sara, and planned with her and fathered Dash?

He wondered if his whole personality to this point was merely a projection he’d created to function in the U.S.

The thought that emerged these past three months in his birthplace, where he felt like a foreigner in practical society and profoundly himself when alone, never progressed. It only was.

He walked in circles around the small hut and yard, naked.

India was exploding with possibilities as the U. S. downspiralled.

For two and a half months he’d been walking in this circle, going swimming twice a day, and walking in this circle.

Because he knew nothing ends he had no answer.

He stopped walking and snorted aloud, “Yeah, right, I’m going to start mining thorium from the sand.”

Kiran drew the curtains and lay down on the mat. He was still. The fans turned. Then nothing moved. The power was intermittent.

With the power cut it was too hot to sleep or work and when he heard a high-pitched, “eeeeeeeeeeeee!” – the whine of the first mosquito – he leapt up.

Lying naked in a still hut by the beach mid-morning was asking for months of nasty joint pain: the blood-suckers carried chikungunya. He’d have to go into town.

Kiran wrapped himself in a cotton lungi and took a long-sleeve jibba from the second drawer of his dresser. As he pulled it over his head, he heard the call of Ambika, the fishmonger: “Meee-eeeeen!”

The woman sat patiently awaiting him on the dusty patio outside his gate. She had a wide, shallow, stainless steel dish on her lap. There was usually little left to choose from by the time she got to his hut because Kiran woke later than everyone else in the village and went swimming with the sun well up 

Ambika woke with her husband long before dawn. She made him capi and saw him off to the sea. She received him back after sunrise. The men divided the day’s catch and she cleaned and prepared her dish with the wives of the other fishermen. They each walked a separate route through the village to sell their share of the ocean’s bounty.

Ambika wore a sea-green and midnight-blue sari with thin, gold lining that matched her nose ring and the gold chain that hung around her neck signifying she was wed. She had dark skin and deep blue tattoos on both arms in the style of the older tribes. She was just two years older than Kiran, but years in the sun in this beach village, gave her a wizened look.

Today she had a single white perch and two giant tiger prawns. The mid-morning sun glistened and flashed brightly off the stainless steel dish as she swiveled it to show him. He bought the perch but then asked if he could take a picture of the prawns.

Ambika loved when he did this. Despite the ubiquity of phones in the village nowadays, no one used them to take pictures of food. It was something foreigners did. This time she posed, which was a first.

Kiran had eight pictures of Ambika in his phone, documenting seven different species on her dish. In the initial snaps she looked wary and stoic – on occasion suspicious. Now she took time to position herself. She turned the dish to prevent glare. She drew the top of her sari from her shoulder up and over her head to shade her face.

Suddenly, Kiran realized that she, and therefore all the villagers, must think he was leaving. He imagined her saying to the fishermen’s wives that next time he asked to take a picture of her fish, she would pose – because ‘who knew where sir was going and who all then would see her?’

He bent down and zoomed in on the dish, eliminating her from frame. The prawns were huge, at least ten inches long. Green and dark gray at the tips of their tails, their color grew lighter along the fat crustaceans’ bodies over the swimming legs, and pink toward the fore. The walking legs were striped a cartoonish pink-and-white beneath the dull, gray-pink carapaces.

Two round black eyes sat like little black caviar roe placed atop the rostrum above the wiry, red antennae that swept out before them. “Decapods,” Kiran thought, as he set his left hand beside the dish and stuck his index finger out for scale. He had never seen prawns this size before – not in the U.S. He suddenly felt he couldn’t think of anything better about the USA at all.

He stood up, and thanked and paid Ambika. Then he took the perch back inside. He had leftover rice from last night’s meal. He warmed it in the pan as he fried the fish. He stirred in some diced green onion and ginger, finally adding some cut spinach and chili paste. A squeeze of lemon brought out the flavor of the whitefish. It cut flaky and tasted delicious.

As he ate, Kiran thought again about Ambika. She saw much more clearly than he did despite all his travels and his western education. She and the other villagers were lighting-quick-witted. Their connection through daily process to thousands of years of Tamil made it so.

His mind was filled with the ceaseless noise of his Facebook, Twitter and IG scrolls.

When he arrived he never said when he’d depart. They knew before he knew himself. They were reading him as they read every tourist who came to stay.

The villagers’ lives were unchanged for centuries. They’d seen many come and go, among whom he was no more or less unique – to them he was a simpleton.

Kiran finished eating, washed up and changed into trousers, replacing his chappals with closed-toed black loafers. He had to go to the bank.

He wheeled the bike out, locked the gate and pushed off. He took the main road only as far as the first circle road. He did not want to pass the cafe on the way in. He wasn’t ready to face the gossip pit of expats and regulars yet. Cutting east, he headed down back alleys to the bank.

Emerging from one of these alleys into the round that diverted lorries and buses to the highway, he crossed but got caught between lights at the auto-rickshaw stand.

“Dey! Merica-sir!” a voice yelled at him. He turned to see the autorick driver he’d been buying ganja from standing among a cadre of his fellow drivers. He called him “Merica-sir” because he knew he hated it.  It was both respect-building for his local familiarity with Kiran, a foreigner, and it was a dismissive dig.

The driver waggled his hand in a combination hang-loose and call-me sign. His head swiveled in the back-and-forth bobbling unique to South Indians that asks, implies and gestures, at once.

Kiran shook his head and waved him off as the light changed. If he hustled, he could make the light at the next round while all the lights between were green.

He drew a gulp of dusty, earthen air, the grit and residue of thousands of souls, and pushed hard. The auto-rick driver squeezed his rubber air-horn in a honkedy-honk-goodbye which Kiran was surprised he could pick out from the tumultuous roar of the busy street.

He made the lights, swung into the next roundabout and shot out into the bank parking lot. He pulled onto the front patio and chained his bike to the end of the crowded stand. There was a mall adjacent to the bank. The bike rack was always crowded.

Kiran loved coming to the bank. It had an entrance way – mirror-tinted double glass doors let you in to a small foyer and another set of glass doors that led inside. It was a glass air lock – an area to shake oneself of the dust and heat before entering the cool A/C and the clean confines of the bank.

There was a water fountain in the foyer and even a small, single-stall restroom with a sink. Kiran went in and rinsed off, wiping the sweat and dust from his arms and face. He dried his hands by pushing back his hair, took a deep breath and looked at himself in the mirror. He was older.

His temples were flecked with gray that contrasted sharply with his long black hair. His scruffy beard was equally salty. He knew he’d have to shave it all before going back to the U.S. He pulled down the skin under his eyes and stared into himself. When he let go he pored over the extent of the bags.

Kiran had opened the bank account from California over the net. They overnighted him a card international express. When he arrived at the airport in Chennai, he withdrew 120,000 rupees. He used it to get situated. Only then did he use the card to buy sundries in town.

He knew the e-trail of his purchases was being closely observed by the bank. If he spent money at Western fast food chains and checked into a 5-star hotel it meant one thing. If he bought groceries and supplies from local shops, it meant something else. He paid for the hut in cash.

After a few days in the village, he made his way to the bank on a bicycle, covered in cotton. On a Tuesday, a week after he had been in town, Kiran made a showy first appearance at the bank to “meet the manager” and be seen by those who had been watching his purchases as a non-resident Indian.

It was standard practice:  make it seem you have plenty of money in the U.S. and are here to share it with family and explore business opportunities. Behave as local as you can. He used the card to buy his bicycle. He used cash when he rented a moto.

He never used the card at local bars. It was the first arrangement he made with Phillipe. He left a deposit, ran a tab till an agreed upon limit and then paid in full in rupee notes. Keeping currency fluid was an invaluable skill of travel.

Mr. Srinivasan was a prototypical South Indian money manager: balding on top and clean shaven, with a round face and baby cheeks. He wore thin wire spectacles that could have been a decade old. He wore a brown suit. It was 42 degrees C outside and this guy was in a suit.

“It is vonderful to see young men doing well in America and coming home to invest,” Srinivasan had remarked as they signed the paperwork. There was an old wooden abacus at the edge of his desk.  In the corner, unused, sat a typewriter. Kiran gave him a thumb impression for the bank’s records. “Will you require transfer account?” Srinivasan had asked.

“Not at the moment,” Kiran had replied, “We’ll see.”

The manager bobbled his head at him, “India is booming, sir. You will do very well here now. And your vife, sir?”

“We’re divorced,” Kiran had murmured, signing and initialing paperwork. It was another tight, efficient lie, that pegged him as American.

Srinivasan immediately fired off the excessive tsks that were so common here, “Tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk” – a rapid-fire nine tsks was considered more empathetic – “terrible,” he had concluded.

Now, as the interior glass doors slid open before him, Kiran realized he looked forward to seeing the old man again. Srinivasan would testify to his goodness if called upon to do so while he was away. Kiran was confident he’d left an impressive e-trail of purchases and relationships.

There was a podium placed beside the doors as he entered. This was new. A tall, thin, mustachioed young boy in uniform stood at the podium and greeted him. Kiran asked to see Srinivasan. The boy furrowed his brow and looked down at a nonexistent list. “There is no one here working by that name, sir.”

Kiran then asked after the manager and was told he would have to make an appointment. He told the young man to go and ask the manager if he would see him now. Being pushy at the bank exhibited the confidence of both a wealthy American and a local Brahmin. It couldn’t hurt to try.

“Madam is a madam, sir.” the boy replied.

“Fine,” Kiran threw on the frustrated voice, “ask her.”

The young man dropped his head to his chest and ran to the back offices. “The new India, “ Kiran  thought, “where turnover is high and smart women make moves to gain control of their lives.”

Now one of them appeared. She was young. “Maybe not 30,” Kiran thought. She was 28: “I’m Urmila.”

Like the bank manager before her, Urmila dressed in western attire, though considerably more sensibly. She wore a thin, black, linen jacket over a light white blouse and a medium-length, business-cut, black skirt. She wore a string of silvery-white pearls. Her gold name tag read: “Urmila Narayan, Manager”.

She extended her hand. Her hair was tied up in a tight bun. She had a sharp but elegant nose over which she now assessed him with searching, dark-brown eyes. All business. They shook and he noticed she looked him-up-and-down before saying, “Come on back to my office.”

Urmila spun around quickly and strode off to the back.  Kiran hop-stepped to catch up. He called out after her, “Hey, listen, I didn’t realize I needed an appointment-”

“It’s no trouble,” she called out over her shoulder, not breaking stride.

Her office was small, but one wall was a window treated with the same mirror-tint on the front of the building and when she closed the door the space was cool, well-lit and humming. There were two wall-mounted monitors overhead which ran livestreams of BTVI and Bloomberg Global and two monitors on a desk crowded with a keyboard, mouse and documents. She sat behind the desk and indicated a chair opposite.

There was unopened mail on the chair. He handed it to her and she glanced at the envelopes as she set them atop all the documents on her desk, put her hands together, looked at him and asked, “What can I do for you?”

“I’m headed back to the States briefly and want to maintain my account. I just wanted to touch base with the bank about that. Clarify dates, if there’s a minimum balance or …” he trailed off.

She looked up his account on one of the monitors before her and said, “I see you opened this just a few months ago. How long do you expect to be gone? Because we have some options.”

Kiran was not prepared for this. It was a long way from balding Srinivasan and his abacus and typewriter of a few months ago. “Uh, I don’t know for sure. I have to go back to take care of a few things. Of course I’ll be in touch from there and I can still conduct operations with my account through transfers and the net, right?”

“Right,” Urmila replied, curtly, as if suddenly realizing exactly whom she was dealing with.

She sat back and spoke quickly: “You’ve taken our most basic account, which you opened with a principal balance you deposited as a lump sum from your account in California before you arrived. The monthly fee for the card and other services has been taken out of this principal. So if you continued with this basic account, you’d have to keep paying the monthly fee and maintain a balance,” she paused, scanning the monitor, “I think it’s like 100,000 rupees. There would of course be penalties if you didn’t manage this.”

“Sure, I understand,” Kiran  replied.

“Alternatively,” Urmila continued, swiveling in her chair to a shelf behind her, “I would encourage you to consider investing with us.” She pulled down a glossy folder from the shelf and passed it to him. It was filled with printed pages and charts. “Here’s a simple explanation of some of the opportunities we have. You could leave as little as 5,000 US here and it would be working for you.”

Kiran tried to look cool. “Oh, I see,” he took the folder and pretended to flip through it. His ignorance wasn’t lost on her. “But I guess there would be tax implications …” he trailed off again.

Urmila sighed and grabbed a business card, flipped it and deftly wrote her number on the back.  “This is my mobile. It’ll be easier than trying to use the appointment line. Call me direct to discuss and we can do the needful.” She handed the card across the desk to him and sat back.

He realized this was all the time she had and stood. He thanked her as they shook hands and he left. It was all cold, swift, mechanical and delivered exactly as it might have been in Modesto. “The new India,” he thought.

He put the folder in his backpack and headed out of the bank. The second doors opened and the heat hit him like a wall. He craved a drink, but knew he had to visit the Internet cafe first. He had to look up flights and let Sara and Dash know he was headed back.  He unchained the bike and set off.

He pulled up to the cafe and was pleased to see there weren’t that many bikes out front. School hadn’t let out yet. In the afternoons the place was swamped with teenagers. There were only 15 cubicles, stalls really, so groups of kids hung around each, spilling over.

Kiran checked in and slid into a stall. He ran a Kayak search on tickets and checked every box: Cheap-O air and ijustfly and orbitz and priceline and whatever Indian options they added. There were nearly a dozen windows to sift through to get an idea of a price range. He would use the range to negotiate with a local travel agent for a lower price or a better flight. After a half hour of collecting data, his mind swimming with flight numbers, fares and connections, he shut down all the sites and put away his notes.

He wrote Sara first. Short sentences. Their relationship had decayed to where only the most pertinent info was exchanged. It was like writing a telegram in the last century: “Home next month. When can I see him? – K.”

He thought about writing to Dash to tell him as well, but realized he didn’t have concrete dates to share. Instead, he sent him a few snaps of the beach and of an elephant he saw on the road. “Wish you were here. How are the A’s doing?” he wrote. Kiran wondered if Dash even kept up with baseball.

He spent a few minutes looking for articles about thorium in the sands of Tamil Nadu. He stared at images of monazite-laden sand. He couldn’t tell anything from comparing the images. They all looked different from each other and the sand by his hut.

The tiny bell on the front door of the Internet cafe began ringing periodically and insistently, as teenagers and their posses kicked it open and filed in. Many of them were Dash’s age.

It was time to go.